Family and Other Accidents (30 page)

“Keelie invited me.” Brandon nods at her sister, who perks up, momentarily forgetting Jorie's hair.

“I made you that drink you wanted.” Keelie smiles and hands Brandon a blue plastic cup. When she starts high school next year, she won't be voted Girl You Most Want to Fuck, she'll be voted Girl You Want to Be Stranded on an Island With. “And, Jor, you have to say hi to Uncle Jack and Aunt Mona.”

“I thought he was marrying Kathy,” Jorie says sharply.

“I don't know the details, but they came a really long way.”

Jorie is about to tell Keelie to fuck off, but her sister waves over the aunt in question.

“Aunt Mona,” Keelie says with the affected diction she reserves for important adults. “We haven't had much time to talk, but Jorie and I just wanted to make sure you knew how glad we were that you could come, right, Jor?”

Jorie nods and takes a sip of Brandon's drink, feels the burn of rum in her throat. She doesn't have strong feelings about her aunt one way or the other, associates Mona with the blur of grown-ups from her father's illness, forever whisking her and Keelie off to G-rated movies, Disney On Ice shows, and children's museums.

“I just can't believe Connor is forty,” Mona says, and Jorie can see the line where her ivory makeup stops on her ivory skin, a pretty but aging woman. “When I met him he was just this skinny kid who didn't like me.”

“What was he like, Aunt Mona?” Keelie, so sincere Jorie almost believes her.

“Well, he was a terrible driver, always getting into accidents.” Mona shakes her head, and Jorie stifles a snort, assuming her mother said something about Jorie failing her driver's test. “He was funny and sooo cute, and he was always losing things.”

“He still is,” Keelie says.

“And there was this one time, right when I first started dating Jack, when I opened the bedroom door and Connor literally fell in,” Mona says, as if she isn't speaking to them but to some distant, different time. “He was sitting outside Jack's door, wearing nothing but underwear, in the middle of the night.”

“Really?” Jorie is suddenly engaged. “Like was he listening to you guys in the bedroom, listening to, you know?”

“Huh, maybe that wasn't the most appropriate story to tell.” Mona's cheeks flush burgundy. “I guess he could have been. It was such an awkward thing, we never talked about it again. God, he must have been just about your age, Jorie.”

Jorie thinks about her father at her age, sitting outside his brother's bedroom, straining to hear the sounds of love, and she wants to ask her aunt more. But bratty Ryan, hair red as his mother's, pulls on Mona's sleeve, tells her that he's using chopsticks to eat the sushi, and she should come watch.

“Excuse me.” Mona smiles and backs into the dining room.

Keelie rolls her eyes at Jorie, and for a severed second they're sisters, united by the fact that their cousin is infinitely more spoiled and awful than either of them. Then Keelie puts her hand lightly on Brandon's chest.

“May I get you another drink?” The affected grown-up voice again. “It looks as though my sister finished yours.”

“Are you always this sweet?” Brandon asks. “Maybe you could teach Jor a thing or two.”

Jorie starts walking away, and Brandon abandons Keelie to follow. Jorie looks at him flatly and tells him to get a bottle of something, so he goes back the bar in the family room for a bottle of Grey Goose. He reaches for her hand, and she lets him take it         .         .         .         for now.

         

Watching an overindulged child rattle off the names of the state capitals isn't something Jack would have thought he'd ever enjoy, but he and Mona stand around in his ex-sister-in-law's new place encouraging Ryan and actually clapping. And even though it isn't, it somehow feels familiar.

The whole discussion with Kathy had ended up being much easier than he'd envisioned. She has a court date the Monday after the party. True, Jack hadn't mentioned the event until after he'd checked her docket, but when he finally did, he hadn't even lied about Mona. He'd simply told Kathy that his ex-wife would be there too and waited for her to say something.

“Of course,” Kathy had said. “She and Conn have always been close.”

It had been a Sunday night and Kathy was wearing glasses on the end of her nose, her pale hair held back with a scrunchie. He'd felt more for her then than he ever had, so much that his heart actually seemed to swell and press against his ribs. “I'll miss you,” he said, knowing it was true, but also knowing that he was taking Mona to Boston.

And he did. At seven this morning he kissed Kathy good-bye and picked Mona and Ryan up from the condo, where they'd never really lived together as a family. It was raining and Mona was wearing a fitted yellow slicker. Even though she and Ryan were under the building's awning, she held a bright blue umbrella and she twirled it a tiny bit when he pulled the car around. It was something about that action, a simple flick of her wrist, that made him certain this was the right thing, maybe not for Mona or Kathy or even Ryan, but taking Mona to see his brother in Boston was the right thing for him.

When their plane shot into the air, he reached for the armrest but grabbed Mona's hand by mistake. She smiled and squeezed his fingers, bumped her knee against his, and he'd felt it again.

Ryan didn't seem to notice anything until they checked into a junior suite at the Harbor Hotel and started unpacking.

“Wait.” Ryan looked up from his video game. “Are you and Dad staying in the same room?”

“Is that okay?” Mona asked Ryan, but she was looking at Jack.

For the first time it occurred to Jack that his son could report back to Kathy, but the idea wasn't frightening. He would have to talk to Kathy when he got back anyway. “What, you're so old you need your own room now?” he asked lightly.

“I'm not sleeping with you, Dad, you snore.” Ryan shrugged and went back to his game.

Even when they showed up at Laine's apartment this afternoon to get ready, no one had said anything about Kathy. Instead, Laine took her twice-over ex-sister-in-law into her arms. “It's been too long,” she said.

And in this room full of his brother's people in his brother's city he's stopped saying “ex” when he introduces Mona. She's not correcting everyone either. And now their son is doing parlor tricks, impressing people by his ability to list trivial things like state capitals and the names of world leaders—the fruits of the overpriced private school he attends.

Mona taps Jack's hip with hers and smiles. “Wonder who he gets it from?” she says, and Jack remembers the Cuyahoga County Geography Bee when he was nine. His father had brought stacks of xeroxed documents to go over; his mother had kept ducking out to check her calls at the pay phone. Both of them had been older and icier than the other parents, and yet they'd still been there. And Jack wonders if maybe that's what's really important, just showing up.

“We should get a picture of this,” Mona says. “Did you bring a camera?”

“We left it at home,” Jack says, realizing that he means the hotel room. But he doesn't correct himself, because the junior suite at the Harbor is the only home the three of them have ever lived in together.

         

Connor's interest in his grad-school tennis partner's diatribe about the benefits of hatha yoga wouldn't fill a thimble, but he sinks back in the cream-cheese leather sofa, sips a Corona, and pretends to care. He's glad when Keelie rests her butt on the edge of the couch and touches his forearm.

“I got you a present, Daddy,” she says when the grad-school tennis player gets up for more mini crab cakes.

“You didn't have to—”

“Daddy.”
Keelie smiles, more sophisticated than thirteen. “It's your birthday, of course I did. It's in my room.”

She takes his hand and leads him down the hall to her girlie room, where everything is shabby chic linens and baby's breath. It's almost identical to the one she has in his apartment, only this one is twice as large. He sits on her bed and fiddles with the lace of the long canopy, while she brings out a large wrapped rectangle, obviously a framed poster or painting.

Expecting something thoughtless and haphazard, he is floored when he rips off the curled ribbons and red foil paper, revealing the framed black-and-white poster of John F. Kennedy, the exact print that hung over his desk in high school.

“Where—” He shakes his head at his daughter. She's already achingly beautiful, and will only become more beautiful.

“I remembered it in our basement.” Keelie's grin is wide, her satiny cheeks dimpled. “And Mom was always saying it was the only thing you took with you from your house in Cleveland. So I went to the Kennedy Library, and they had the same one.”

Then he's on his feet holding her small, soft body. “It's the most amazing thing anyone has ever given me.”

“Really? It wasn't that big a deal, I just took the T to the Kennedy Libr—”

“No, Ke, I mean it,” he says, and feels as though an anvil has been lifted from his back, because he knows that she will be okay. No matter what happens, Keelie will be fine, because she has the skills to negotiate the world and depth below the sparkly eye shadow and pinked lips.

“I love you so much,” he says, and then she
is
only thirteen—shy, and short, saying she loves him, too. Then she just stands there.

“You better get back to your friends.” He tilts his head in the direction of the door, and she retreats to the safe and superficial.

When she's gone, he holds the poster at arm's length and stares into the flat black eyes of the late president. Then he goes to find his brother.

         

In the room her mother keeps for her but Jorie rarely uses, she and Brandon sit on the bed someone else made and pass the bottle of vodka between them. He tells her about what she's missed at school, about a party they're invited to next Saturday. His hand is on her knee, and she lets it stay there, lets him slide the hand along her thigh, considers the possibility that she's wrong to hate him. She feels herself floating above his touch, until he runs fingers under her top and tweaks her nipple. She pushes him away.

“Get off me, I don't want to.”

“Okay.” Brandon strokes her hair. “Whatever you want.”

“Why are you even here?” Jorie asks, and because she wants him to leave, adds, “Shouldn't you be off banging a cheerleader?”

“What are you talking about? I love you.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you think you love me?”

“I don't know.” Brandon shrugs. “Because you're beautiful and smart, and you know things.”

She remembers his face hanging over hers during sex, twisted and stupid, the way he panted and moved with more urgency when he got close to orgasm.

“Can you just go?” she says, and looks at her black boots. “I really just want you to leave.”

When she looks up he's gone, and she distracts herself with the mail her mother stacked on her desk. Letters and pamphlets from colleges that'd apparently gotten wind of her astronomical PSAT scores, far away schools like Cornell, Columbia, Penn, Chicago, Rice, Stanford, and Miami (though they might have been more interested in the results of the Girl You Want to Fuck poll). But then she thinks of her father alone in the city without her. Earlier in the parking lot he'd looked faded, and she'd seen defeat in his eyes she recognized from her childhood, when she was only allowed into his hospital room for a few minutes at a time. She remembers he took her finger in his hand, their secret gesture since she was a baby. Taking another sip of vodka, she reminds herself to be more vigilant in making him see doctors, eat vegetables, and go to the gym. One more sip, and she goes back to the party to check on him.

Even though the party is for grown-ups, it's morphed into the kind of event she goes to with Brandon and his friends. Her mother and the dweeb dance in the living room, people laugh and bump into the heavy stone coffee table, everyone lubricated by wine and spirits.

“Where's Brandon?” Keelie asks when Jorie stumbles back into the living room without him. Jorie has a fleeting imagine of Brandon wandering around the Back Bay streets, wondering what he did wrong, but she pushes it out of her mind. “I sent him to boink a cheerleader,” she says, words muffled by a wad of gum to mask the vodka. “What difference does it make to you?”

Keelie shrugs.

“Did you dye your hair to look more like me?” Keelie asks.

And for the first time Jorie realizes her sister does have black hair. It's not as though Jorie forgot, it's simply that Jorie never thinks about Keelie—days go by at her father's house where Jorie doesn't remember she has a sister.

But that's not why. On Thursday Jorie had been studying at Café Paridisio, avoiding Brandon and the boys at Natick Senior High who wanted to fuck her, when a familiar-looking blond man asked if she was Laine Rosen's daughter. Jorie nodded, and the man told her to say hi from Mike Murphy. It was a solid hour before Jorie realized that the man was the same one in the decaying prom photos in her mother's old room at her grandmother's house. And Jorie had thought about her mother at her age, having sex, making As, and shuffling between the houses of her mother and father. Until one day, poof, a broken condom or a failed diaphragm, whatever it was, then a wedding in January and Jorie's birthday the next month. It had made Jorie's stomach bunch into her spine, and she stopped by CVS for the Clairol on the T ride home.

“Did you dye your hair to look like me?” Keelie asks again.

“You mean fat?” Jorie says.

Keelie's dark eyes darken. “You're just saying that.”